Past Exhibitions

Disguise: Masks & Global African Art

Enter a new mask—one for the 21st century: it’s startling and joyful but also serious and menacing. When our experiences become difficult or curious, how do we confront what can’t be explained?

One option is to shake it out by adopting disguises and staging a masquerade.

Contemporary artists from Africa and of African descent explore this impulse by filling the galleries with inventive avatars and provocative new myths, taking us on mysterious journeys through city streets and futuristic landscapes.

What are you hiding?

​We all wear masks, whether literal or ​imaginary. Sometimes a smile may disguise our thoughts, or we wear a complete costume to inspire new reactions. This museum version of Disguise is an unusually ​unfixed exhibition that has been conceived as a unique form of performance—a masquerade in slow motion—taking shape for a few months and then ultimately vanishing from view. It follows the premise of masquerades that don’t usually take place on fixed stages, with a curtain rising predictably on each act. Instead, they tend to invade daily life with dramatic force, ​upsetting the normal order of things.

Disguise represents a genre that allows artists to conceal, or amplify, one identity so they can shapeshift and communicate about other re​alities. What isn’t easily conveyed in conventional illustrations or spoken about in normal exchanges becomes the focus of their attention. You’ll see many tactical cover-ups: masks, performances, costumes, illusions, and props, all employed to reach other versions of reality and, perhaps, the hidden dimensions of our lives.

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Lighted imagery and information share an affinity with the human brain.

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Jakob Dwight​​

The Autonomous Prism / MSK03, 2010-2014

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“​We create whirl-​winds...”​

Zina Saro-Wiwa​

The Invisible Man, 2014

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“...to show how we keep the fake idea of the primitive alive.”

Brendan Fernandes​​

Dada Afrika IV, 2010

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What is the next generation for Disguise?

Many of the artists in Disguise work in multimedia or on installations that place sculptures in imaginary settings. Several have mastered digital tools to develop visual envelopes unlike any that have been opened before. They create masks for the 21st century—​potent faces and characters that take on current events and direct our thinking toward the future.

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By not having a face, I become a prop in the space.

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Jacolby Satterwhite

En Plein Air: Abduction II, 2014

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I think we all have a dark, animalistic side of ourselves.

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​Nandipha Mntambo

Europa, 2008

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I want to interrupt someone's daily journey with something different.

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Wura-Natasha Ogunji

An Ancestor Takes a Photograph, 2014​

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How do you make a masquerade in a museum?

Masquerades rely on an amalgamation of sounds, actions, and visions that transform the everyday. For the museum setting, certain sp​ecial effects are possible; others can only be suggested. In an effort to alert visitors about the potential for surprise, a flute will signal the fact that disguises are about to appear. This flute introduces a soundtrack that sets different stages of the exhibition apart. The soundtrack is just one of eight commissions created exclusively for this presentation of Disguises.

What follows is a series of galleries with many immersive experiences that have been created by artists, mostly in the last year. Some will feature African masks from SAM’s renowned collection that offer points of connection and inspiration, while others have chosen to respond to masquerades in more general terms. Their offerings allow masks to take flight into the future, to pulsate with digital vitality, to activate communities, to resonate with sounds, and to disrupt familiar perception.

These artists take masks off the wall and give them life. They create a masquerade—vibrant, dramatic, thrilling, and changeable—inside the museum.

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My woven suits reflect very overtly on our preoccupation with barriers and defences in our society.

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Walter Oltmann

Bristle Disguise (detail), 2014

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I construct objects, bodies, and landscapes to immerse us in the logic of another place.